Turgid Talmage must likewise unload; Talmage, who presumes to teach not only theology but political economy; who interlards his sermons with strange visions of Heaven, dreams of Hell, and still more wonderful hints on how to make a people terrestrially prosperous. He, like thousands of "able editors," apologizes for such vulgar extravagance by urging that it "puts money in circulation, makes business better, and helps the people by supplying employment!" Has the world passed into its dotage, or simply become an universal asylum for idiots? If wanton waste makes business better, then Uncle Sam has but to squander in bal-masques, or other debauchery, his seventy-five billions of wealth to inaugurate an industrial boom! To gratify their taste for the barbaric, to advertise themselves to all the earth as the eastern termini of west-bound equines, the Bradley-Martins wiped out of existence $500,000 of the world's wealth, leaving just that much less available capital for productive enterprises. They might as well have burned a building or sunk a vessel of that value. It is urged that "labor was employed and paid." Quite true; but tell me, thou resounding ministerial vacuum, thou unreflecting editorial parrot, where is its product? What has society to show for the expenditure of this energy? A hole in its working capital--a hiatus in its larder caused by employing and sustaining labor, not to produce but to destroy. Prodigality on the part of the rich personally benefits a few parasites, just as the bursting of a molasses barrel fattens useless flies; but waste, by reducing the amount of wealth available for reproduction, breeds general want. A thousand editors have screamed in leaded type that it were "worse for the wealthy to hoard than waste." Thou lunatics, go learn the difference between a car and its load of cotton, a bolt of muslin and that wherewith it is measured, a nation's wealth and its exchange media. What does a man with the wealth he "hoards?" Does he not seek to make it earn an increment? Concentration of capital may be bad for the people, but destruction of capital takes the tools from their hands and the food from their lips. The court of Louis XV., which American snobs have just expended half-a-million trying to imitate, likewise, "made business better" by wasting wealth--Madame DuBarry posing as "public benefactress," and receiving no end of encomiums from Paris shopkeepers, jewel merchants and mantua-makers. Much money was "put in circulation and labor employed" in furnishing forth the transient splendors of players and prostitutes; but somehow France did not prosper. Finally not even the pitiless screws of the tax-farmer could wring blood from the national turnip. The working capital of France was so far consumed that her people stood helpless, perishing of hunger. Finally Madame DuBarry was supplanted as "public benefactress" by one with an even sharper tang to her tongue, namely,